Made of the three gunas, namely, satwa,
raja and tama, and destined to live enveloped in maya, humans lack the
necessary clarity of vision to make sense of the world and even one’s own small
world. If this view of the human predicament is unpalatable to someone, he (or she
or they), might like to turn to some modern theory of the essential human
nature (say, a theory of knowledge as biological endowment) together with some
theory of the humans’ failure to make good sense of the social world he lives
in (“Orwell’s Problem”, for instance, a rather poetical conception of the real
human problem, one might say). Humans, with their sense of insecurity, fear and
desire for acquisition and the world being partially intelligible at most, it has
never been an easy place to live in for anyone and has been particularly hard
for the marginalized at all times. Now, as for fakery, unless one is a compulsive
imposter or finds fun in pretending, one wears a mask to serve one’s own interest
or to protect oneself. If one is clever, the others fail to see the mask, at
least during their interaction. These hold for our world and for the world of Sarala
Mahabharata as well.
One might be inclined to say that
in Sarala Mahabharata, Sakuni is the very name of faking. Sakuni is
unfortunate because there were others who faked at one time or the other, but one
would hardly mention them: the Pandavas, Kunti, Dhritarashtra, Vidura and
Sanjaya and that doesn’t close the list. Weren’t the Pandavas and Draupadi
imposters in the kingdom of king Virata? She was generosity incarnate when Kunti
dressed her husband’s co-wife, Madri, for her meeting with a god she would invoke
to get a child. But she could not sleep, anxious to know about who she was going
to invoke, and unknown to her, kept peeping into her room. Her fear was that if
Madri got a child from a god, mightier than the three gods from whom she had
got her children, then her child would be more powerful than hers and her wish
to see her son, Yudhisthira, as the king of Hastinapura, would surely not be
fulfilled. Now, wasn’t her generosity towards Madri fake, strictly speaking? As
for Vidura and Sanjaya, both highly trusted by Dhritarashtra, did they not fake
when they did not tell the Kuru elders that the Pandavas had not perished in
the fire at the lac house, and thereby made it possible for him to anoint Duryodhana
as the king of Hastinapura? This would certainly not have happened if the Kuru
elders knew the truth.
Think of Sahadeva. In the second
game of dice, he rolled the dice for both Yudhisthira and Duryodhana and made
sure that the eldest Pandava lost. Both Yudhisthira and Duryodhana believed
that he, who knew the past, the present and the future, was playing honestly
for them. He betrayed both. But neither they nor anyone else ever got to know
that he had a definite purpose in mind when he was rolling the stick-dice. During
the Great War at Kurukshetra, he had a role in the killing of Abhimanyu; he had
told Krishna how Arjuna could be separated from Abhimanyu that day so that the young
warrior would lose his most powerful defence and become extremely vulnerable. No
one ever knew about it. When the fighting stopped for the day and Abhimanyu’s
body arrived, he was among the mourners. Wasn’t there some fakery somewhere? Years
ago, when Duryodhana, who had orchestrated the lac house fire, saw the charred
bodies in the house and was certain that those were the remains of the Pandavas’
and their mother Kunti’s, he had wept bitterly and those tears were fake, as Sakuni,
Vidura and Sanjaya knew. There was another among the mourners who knew, but he
was shedding fake tears himself! In Sarala
Mahabharata, there is nothing that this mourner didn’t know and there was nothing
that happened without his will.
Think of Nakul. In the Mango of Truth
episode, he declared, among other things, in the presence of his brothers,
Draupadi, Vyasa, the fake sage Gauramukha and Krishna, that his loyalty to Yudhisthira
was total. There was nothing that he had done till then and nothing that he did
later that could be used to charge him of disloyalty with respect to the eldest
Pandava. Now, when Krishna told him, when they were alone, that he was going to
Duryodhana as Yudhisthira’s emissary for peace, he requested him to ask the Kaurava
king for two villages, one for himself and the other for his brother, Sahadeva.
After all, they were Madri’s children and Yudhisthira, Bhima and Arjuna were
Kunti’s. In trying times, they were all together but in better times, after the
war, Kunti’s children might not share the prosperity with them. In view of that,
he thought that they would have those two villages to sustain themselves. Now, is
it unreasonable to ask whether there wasn’t some fakeness in his relationship
with his elder brothers, no matter that it was never translated into words or
deeds?
Think of Karna, the commander-in-chief
of the Kaurava army on the 16th and the 17th day of the
Great War Kurukshetra, and the eldest child of Kunti, a fact known to everyone,
right from his childhood days, in Sarala Mahabharata. He found himself
in a situation where he promised Kunti that he would spare all the Pandavas
barring Arjuna in the battlefield. This had happened before the war started and
no one in the Kaurava army knew about it. Vidura knew but he wasn’t fighting;
in any case, he wasn’t going to betray Kunti.
During his command of the Kaurava
army, he could have killed the four Pandavas but he did not. The killing of
Yudhisthira or Bhima would not have been sufficient to win the war, but the consequences
of their killing would have been momentous. Considering that he was the friend on
whom Duryodhana had absolute trust, he turned out to be a fake, as a friend. He
was also a fake as the commander-in-chief of the Kaurava army.
Is there anything that might
persuade one to reconsider his betrayal and see if it could be condoned? One
would then have to ask why he didn’t tell Duryodhana about his word to Kunti. Maybe
he believed that he could kill Arjuna and that once that was achieved, it would
not be long before the Pandavas lost. He had the infallible weapon of god Indra
and he also had the powerful snake arrow. Had Krishna not saved him, Arjuna
would have been killed. But Krishna had not been part of his plan. He knew who
Krishna was and he knew the powers of the Avatara, but does take into
consideration destiny as one makes one’s plans?
This is perhaps the best that
could be said for him, but questions would remain. We need not pursue this
matter here; his fakeness might not invite censor, considering his
circumstances, but the fact would remain that he was a fake friend and a fake
leader of the Kaurava army.
Think of Bhishma and Drona. Bhishma
tried to kill Arjuna but failed because Krishna intervened and unknown to
everyone in the battlefield, including Bhishma and Arjuna, he destroyed Bhishma’s
infallible arrow with his Sudarshana chakra. As for Drona, he could not take
Yudhisthira as prisoner, despite Arjuna’s absence in the battlefield, because
of Abhimanyu. But both Bhishma and Dona had told the Pandavas what would bring
their fall. Duryodhana was aware of it. Even so, wasn’t that their betrayal of
the Kaurava army?
Think of Gandhari. The war over,
Yudhisthira along with his brothers went to meet Dhritarashtra. The man of virtue,
victory in the fratricidal war had given whom no happiness, was seeking a
reconciliation with the head of the Kuru clan. With him were Vidura and
Krishna. Gandhari expressed her wish to see Yudhisthira and his brothers and wanted
the eldest Pandava to remove the cover from her eyes. Krishna suspected trickery
and took Sahadeva aside and sought his opinion. He told him that she wanted to
destroy Yudhisthhira with her yogic fire. The moment he would remove her cover,
she would open her eyes and destroy him. Krishna asked Durdasa to take off the
cover from his mother’s eyes and sent him to his death. For just once in her
life, in Sarala Mahabharata, Gandhari had resorted to fakery.
Let us pause awhile to shed a quiet
tear for Durdasa. Responding to Yudhisthira’s call in the Kurukshetra
battlefield, this brother of Duryodhana had changed sides and joined him. The eldest
Pandava had promised him protection. When he was alone and weaponless in the
Kaurava side of the battlefield, Durdasa had fought the Kaurava army and protected
him. He had fought valiantly in the war. Now, right in front of his eyes,
Durdasa had been reduced to ashes. True, he could not have saved him; things
happened far too fast for any kind of intervention from him. But shouldn’t the son
of Dharma have protested later when he knew how deception had killed the one
who he had promised protection? Not a murmur of protest ever came from his
lips. But whatever one might say about
him, one cannot perhaps charge him of being fake.
Now think of Dhritarashtra. He
knew, as the others did, that he had become king by his younger brother, Pandu’s
generosity. When Pandu got to know how miserable his elder brother was for not
becoming the king of Hastinapura, he readily abdicated the throne for him and retired
to the forest with his wife, Kunti, telling him that he would protect the
kingdom on his behalf from the forest. This act of exemplary brotherliness did
not endear him to Dhritarashtra. He knew that the kingship that he had obtained
through his brother’s magnanimity would never be his, in either his or anyone
else’s, eyes. He desperately wanted his eldest son to be the king as early as
possible. That way he could have, although only emotionally, what he did not
have, except technically. It is not so much for what he did for which he could
be called fake; he could be called so, for what he had become within. He had found
meaning in life in terms of the throne and the throne had become his obsession
and it is this that had corroded his genuineness. So, what Gandhari intended to
do with respect to Yudhisthira was surprising but what Dhritarashtra intended
to do with Bhima, namely, crush him to death, by inviting him for an embrace,
was not. Pretence had long become part of his personality.
Sakuni’s is a case in contrast.
Sakuni’s fakeness lay in what he did, not in what he was within. He was chosen by
his father and his relatives to avenge their merciless killing through
systematic starvation by Duryodhana. He was duty-bound to his loved dead to destroy
Duryodhana, who had used treachery to have them all imprisoned. With no
material resources, Sakuni had to use treachery to deal with the might of the
Kauravas. Although the Kuru elders, including Dhritarashtra, knew that his
advice to Duryodhana would lead to the destruction of the Kauravas, none ever
suspected that he was fake. Duryodhana died without knowing that he was fake.
But in his heart of hearts,
Sakuni was a genuine person. Notwithstanding that he was doing his duty to his
ancestors, to whom he owed his life, he knew that what he was doing was wrong,
both as Duryodhana’s uncle and his most trusted advisor. He wanted to atone for
his doings by getting killed in the battlefield. This was what he told the
Avatara in Udyoga Parva: hari sateka bhanajanta maraibi muhin…apara
hatya dosa hoibaka mote…hari tohara mukha cahin bharata juddhare padile/
nana pataka khandiba rana jagyan kale (Hari, I will get a hundred
nephews killed…sins of killing will accrue to me. Hari, looking at your face
when one will fall in the Bharata War/ numerous sins of his will be destroyed
in that yajna). This was his response to what the Avatara had told him: gobinde
boile sakuni tu thibu na samaye/ ambhara tule tu pache jibu na swarga jaen
(Govinda said, Sakuni, you live/ later with me you will go to the abode of the
gods). Apart from Sahadeva, Sanjaya and Vidura, no one knew that he was a great
devotee of Krishna and was aware of his avataric purpose.
As we close, we draw attention to
the fact that we have not mentioned Krishna in the context of the present
discussion. From a laukika point of view, he faked in much of what he said
and did. Forget about the ordinary mortals, he dealt with Balarama, his doting elder
brother and the other incarnation of Narayana, in virtually the same way. He shed false
tears in the house of lac on seeing the charred bodies and Balarama did not
know that he was pretending. He broke his promise to his brother about his not
participating in the Great War at Kurukshetra, when he saved Arjuna from the
infallible, divine arrow of Bhishma and when Balarama confronted him on that
matter, he flatly lied to him.
But Krishna’s doings cannot be viewed
from the laukika perspective in Sarala Mahabharata. He was the purna
avatara of Narayana. He was born a human but unlike the rest of Brahma’s
creation, he wasn’t born to experience the fruit of his karma. He was born with
a cosmic purpose, namely, to reduce the burden of the goddess Earth. His doings
were his lila. And lila cannot be judged from the moral code of
any loka, the one of the mortals or of the divines.
